Dana Charles Mccoy
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 174128 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Dana Charles Mccoy |
| PRENOMES | Dana Charles |
| SOBRENOME | Mccoy |
| ASSINATURA | MCCOY D C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0896-1813 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 63 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 203 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 63 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2011 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Predictive and concurrent validity of caregiver reported early childhood development assessments
Many directly assessed and caregiver-reported measures of early childhood development (ECD) are used to monitor outcomes and evaluate interventions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Many assessments of ECD for children 0–3 years old have robust psychometric properties, but relatively little is known about their ability to predict later developmental and learning outcomes. To address questions about predictive and concurrent validity, w…
Examining trajectories of children’s social–emotional development across cultures.
at baseline = 7.61 years; 50% female) living in Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, and Vietnam to describe children's growth in six social-emotional skills across the first 3 years of formal schooling (i.e., Grades 1-3). For the majority of sites and skills examined, we found annual improvements of 0.04-0.25 standard deviations in children's interpersonal (e.g., relationships and interpersonal negotiation) and intrapersonal social-emotional skills (e.g., crea…
GSED Core Model
The diversity of measures used to assess early childhood development complicates comparison across studies, populations, and programs. The Global Scales for Early Development (GSED) address this challenge by providing interoperable long and short forms (GSED-LF and GSED-SF) linked through a shared measurement model to a common developmental metric, the D-score. This article presents an updated GSED core model based on Rasch analysis of data from …
How does context shape differences and changes in caregivers’ engagement in psychosocial stimulation over time? Evidence from a cross-national study
As few as 34% of 3- and 4-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) receive adequate psychosocial stimulation from their caregivers (e.g., reading books, telling stories, playing). While previous research suggests that structural conditions within LMICs meaningfully influence caregivers’ capacities to engage in psychosocial stimulation of children, it remains unclear how such conditions may underlie both within-household and between-p…
The impact of early childhood care and education training programs on educator outcomes
Online Training of Professionals for Large-Scale Implementation of a Parenting Program in Public Services
Development and validation of the Nurturing Parenting Beliefs and Behaviors Scale (NPBBS)
Despite growing interest in supporting caregivers' use of nurturing care globally, few parenting measures have been validated for use outside of Minority World contexts. This study aims to develop, describe, and provide validity evidence for an efficient, culturally relevant instrument to measure local nurturing parenting beliefs and behaviors regarding responsive caregiving and early learning within a sample of caregivers of 2- to 5-year-olds in…
A Short Parent-Reported Attachment Relationship Questionnaire
Secure attachment relationships provide the foundation for lifelong emotional resilience and social flourishing. However, measuring attachment with observational methods is challenging at scale in low-resource settings. Caregiver-report questionnaires offer a feasible alternative but remain underutilized and insufficiently validated for Majority World contexts. This study aimed to address this gap by culturally adapting and validating the Attachm…
Enhancing comparability in early child development assessment with the D-score
The lack of a valid and interpretable score to track early child development over time is a primary reason for neglecting child development in policymaking. Many instruments exist, but there is no accepted method for comparing their scores across different ages, samples, and instruments. This paper aims (1) to enhance the Development Score (D-score), a unidimensional scale for early child development, to compare measurements across ages, samples,…
Exploring multidimensional approaches to learning during early childhood in Ghana
Improving Measurement Efficiency of an Early Education Quality Monitoring Tool for Majority World Countries
Research Findings: New measures are being developed for quality monitoring of early care and education (ECE) programs in Majority World countries. However, limited psychometric work has identified items most indicative of quality or optimized the content of these tools. Therefore, the goal of this study was to showcase the empirical steps needed to streamline ECE quality monitoring measures and create more efficient, yet psychometrically robust, …
How poverty shapes children’s home, neighborhood, and school environments
Poverty is a notable feature of societies around the world. Poverty constrains children's development and life opportunities, largely through its impacts on environmental forces. As such, it is essential to understand the contexts of poverty. This integrative review presents a conceptual framework of the contextual forces imposed by poverty in children's key proximal environments-their homes, neighborhoods, and schools-delineating both structural…
Parent psychological distress and beliefs about nurturing care
Parental engagement in stimulating activities and support in both formal and informal learning environments are important for early childhood development. However, little is known about how parental mental health and beliefs about early childhood development shape such investments. We draw on a sample of young children and their primary caregiver from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia ( N = 3,000; M age = 34.1 months; 48.5% girls) and examine how parental di…
Adaptation and Efficacy of a Social-Emotional Learning Intervention (SEL Kernels) in Early Childhood Settings in Southeastern Brazil
Prior research has shown that social-emotional learning (SEL) interventions offer promise for supporting young children’s outcomes, but implementation problems are frequent, especially in low-resource contexts. This study describes the adaptation and efficacy of a new, classroom-based SEL intervention for children aged 3 to 6 years in early childhood education programs in Brazil. SEL Kernels are simple, brief, targeted SEL activities that can be …
Reliability and validity of the responsive care tool for children 0–3 years old in a rural, South Asian setting
Research has shown the importance of responsive caregiving for fostering positive development early in life; however, tools measuring these interactions are often impractical for larger scale intervention trials and in settings with resource constraints. The present study provides reliability and validity evidence from Sindh, Pakistan for a tool developed to quantify responsive caregiving. Data were collected from 200 randomly selected households…
The acute effects of community violence on young children's regulatory, behavioral, and developmental outcomes in a low‐income urban sample in Brazil
BACKGROUND: Existing research on the impacts of adversity on young children's psychological well-being has largely focused on household-level risk factors using observational methods in high-income countries. This study leverages natural variation in the timing and location of community homicides to estimate their acute effects on the regulatory, behavioral, and developmental outcomes of Brazilian 3-year-olds. METHODS: = 41.05 months; 53% female;…
The development and validity of the Early Learning Tool for children 0–3-year-old in rural Pakistan
Background: Research has demonstrated the critical role that early learning experiences play in shaping children's cognitive, social, and emotional development. Nevertheless, tools for assessing children's exposure to early learning experiences remain scarce. This paper describes the initial validation of the Early Learning (EL) tool, which captures the levels of stimulation with playthings and people available to children 0-3-year-old in low-res…
When I hold my daughter, she quiets, no need [for]any verbal conversation”
Responsive caregiving is associated with secure attachment and positive child developmental outcomes. However, there is some debate on whether responsive caregiving is a universal construct. Few studies have researched responsive caregiving in diverse cultural settings, particularly in low‐ and middle‐income countries. In this study, we explore if and how responsive caregiving is conceptualized among mothers of children under 3‐years‐old in rural…
Psychometrics of psychosocial behavior items under age 6 years
Because healthy psychosocial development in the first years of life is critical to lifelong well‐being, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations are increasingly interested in monitoring psychosocial behaviors among populations of children. In response, the World Health Organization is developing the Global Scales of Early Development Psychosocial Form (GSED PF) to facilitate population‐level psychosocial monitoring. Once validated, the GS…
The creation of the Global Scales for Early Development (GSED) for children aged 0–3 years
INTRODUCTION: With the ratification of the Sustainable Development Goals, there is an increased emphasis on early childhood development (ECD) and well-being. The WHO led Global Scales for Early Development (GSED) project aims to provide population and programmatic level measures of ECD for 0-3 years that are valid, reliable and have psychometrically stable performance across geographical, cultural and language contexts. This paper reports on the …
Impacts of the Chicago School Readiness Project on measures of achievement, cognitive functioning, and behavioral regulation in late adolescence
The current paper reports long-term impacts of the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) on measures of achievement, cognitive functioning, and behavioral regulation taken toward the end of students' high school careers. The CSRP was a self-regulation-focused early childhood intervention implemented in Head Start centers serving high-poverty neighborhoods in Chicago. The intervention was evaluated through a cluster randomized control trial, pro…
Pushing the boundaries of education research
Pathways between family SES, parent characteristics, early experiences, and child language outcomes in South Korea
Whereas previous research has examined the role that parenting and home environments play in explaining the relation between family socioeconomic status and children's language development in the United States, relatively little is known about the associations between these constructs in other cultures. This study tested an integrated model of language development within a longitudinal data set of 1,894 socioeconomically diverse Korean children (…
Validation of motor, cognitive, language, and socio-emotional subscales using the Caregiver Reported Early Development Instruments
The Caregiver Reported Early Development Instruments (CREDI) are assessments tools for measuring the development of children under age three in global contexts. The present study describes the construction and psychometric properties of the motor, cognitive, language, and socio-emotional subscales from the CREDI’s long form. Multidimensional item factor analysis was employed, allowing indicators of child development to simultaneously load onto mu…
Causal mediation in developmental science
Mediation has played a critical role in developmental theory and research. Yet, developmentalists rarely discuss the methodological challenges of establishing causality in mediation analysis or potential strategies to improve the identification of causal mediation effects. In this article, we discuss the potential outcomes framework from statistics as a means for highlighting several fundamental challenges of establishing causality in mediation a…
Impacts of Early Childhood Education on Medium- and Long-Term Educational Outcomes
Despite calls to expand early childhood education (ECE) in the United States, questions remain regarding its medium- and long-term impacts on educational outcomes. We use meta-analysis of 22 high-quality experimental and quasi-experimental studies conducted between 1960 and 2016 to find that on average, participation in ECE leads to statistically significant reductions in special education placement ( d = 0.33 SD , 8.1 percentage points) and grad…
Instability versus quality
Prior research has found that higher residential mobility is associated with increased risk for children's academic and behavioral difficulty. In contrast, evaluations of experimental housing mobility interventions have shown moving from high poverty to low poverty neighborhoods to be beneficial for children's outcomes. This study merges these disparate bodies of work by considering how poverty levels in origin and destination neighborhoods moder…
Neighborhood Crime and School Climate as Predictors of Elementary School Academic Quality
Past research has found negative relationships between neighborhood structural disadvantage and students’ academic outcomes. Comparatively little work has evaluated the associations between characteristics of neighborhoods and schools themselves. This study explored the longitudinal, reciprocal relationships between neighborhood crime and school‐level academic achievement within 500 urban schools. Results revealed that higher neighborhood crime (…
Children's Cognitive Performance and Selective Attention Following Recent Community Violence
Research has shown robust relationships between community violence and psychopathology, yet relatively little is known about the ways in which community violence may affect cognitive performance and attention. The present study estimates the effects of police-reported community violence on 359 urban children's performance on a computerized neuropsychological task using a quasi-experimental fixed-effects design. Living in close proximity to a rece…
Poverty, physical stature, and cognitive skills
Past research suggests robust positive associations between household socioeconomic status and children's early cognitive development in Western countries. Relatively little is known about these relations in low-income country settings characterized by economic adversity, high prevalence of malnutrition and infectious disease, and relatively lower school enrollment. The present study develops and empirically evaluates an adapted model of early ch…
Relations between parenting practices, socioeconomic status, and child behavior in Brazil
Pathways between paternal and maternal education, caregivers’ support for learning, and early child development in 44 low- and middle-income countries
Neighborhood economic disadvantage and children's cognitive and social-emotional development
Physical punishment as a predictor of early cognitive development
This study estimates the effect of physical punishment on the cognitive development of 1,167 low-income Colombian children (Mage = 17.8 months old) using 3 analytic strategies: lagged-dependent variables, a difference-in-differences-like approach (DD), and a novel strategy combining matching with a DD-like approach. Across approaches, physical punishment at ages 9-26 months predicted reductions in children's cognitive development of 0.08-0.21 SD …
Relationships Among Home Literacy Behaviors, Materials, Socioeconomic Status, and Early Literacy Outcomes Across 14 Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Most research on reading acquisition is conducted in high-income countries, and the majority of the limited research from middle- and low-income countries focuses exclusively on school settings. We therefore know little about how home literacy environments (HLEs) relate to early reading skill acquisition in low-resource settings. This study uses baseline data from 18 Save the Children (SC) project sites across 14 countries in Central America, Asi…
Home- and center-based learning opportunities for preschoolers in low- and middle-income countries
Changes in classroom quality predict Ghanaian preschoolers’ gains in academic and social-emotional skills
Rates of participation in early childhood education (ECE) programs are on the rise globally, including in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet little evidence exists on the quality of these programs and on the role of classroom quality in predicting learning for young children across diverse contexts. This study uses data from the Greater Accra Region of Ghana (N = 3,407; M age = 5.8 years; 49.5% female) to examine how changes in four culturally validated dim…
Pathways between family SES, parent characteristics, early experiences, and child language outcomes in South Korea
Whereas previous research has examined the role that parenting and home environments play in explaining the relation between family socioeconomic status and children's language development in the United States, relatively little is known about the associations between these constructs in other cultures. This study tested an integrated model of language development within a longitudinal data set of 1,894 socioeconomically diverse Korean children (…
A historical look at theories of change in early childhood education research
The acute effect of community violent crime on maternal engagement in cognitive and socioemotional stimulation
Caregiver Emotional Expressiveness, Child Emotion Regulation, and Child Behavior Problems among Head Start Families
The present study examined the relationships between caregivers' self‐reported positive and negative emotional expressiveness, observer assessments of children's emotion regulation, and teachers' reports of children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors in a sample of 97 primarily African American and Hispanic Head Start families. Results indicated that higher caregiver negativity and lower child emotion regulation independently predicted m…
Beyond Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status
The neighborhood literature consistently documents associations between neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) and child development. Yet, this approach may miss important heterogeneity in neighborhood resources (e.g., libraries, doctors’ offices) that have important implications for children. Moreover, the mechanisms that explain the relation between neighborhood characteristics and child outcomes are poorly understood. Using a sample of 955 ch…
Measuring early childhood development at a global scale
Classifying trajectories of social–emotional difficulties through elementary school
Although research has shown fade-out of the cognitive benefits of classroom-based preschool interventions, less is known regarding the durability of social-emotional impacts. This study examines the extent to which the multicomponent Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) intervention lowered risk of internalizing, externalizing, attention, and social difficulties from Head Start through elementary school for 602 low-income children. Results sug…
Stunting risk of orphans by caregiver and living arrangement in low-income and middle-income countries
Early orphanhood constitutes a major risk for children's physical development in LMICs. However, the results suggest that the adverse effects of a parental loss can be mitigated if appropriate support is provided, indicating the potential benefits of the surviving parents staying with their children. The benefits of targeted social policies aimed at single fathers and grandparents supporting orphans may be significant
Impacts of the Chicago School Readiness Project on measures of achievement, cognitive functioning, and behavioral regulation in late adolescence
The current paper reports long-term impacts of the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) on measures of achievement, cognitive functioning, and behavioral regulation taken toward the end of students' high school careers. The CSRP was a self-regulation-focused early childhood intervention implemented in Head Start centers serving high-poverty neighborhoods in Chicago. The intervention was evaluated through a cluster randomized control trial, pro…
Caregiver Emotional Expressiveness, Child Emotion Regulation, and Child Behavior Problems among Head Start Families
The present study examined the relationships between caregivers' self‐reported positive and negative emotional expressiveness, observer assessments of children's emotion regulation, and teachers' reports of children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors in a sample of 97 primarily African American and Hispanic Head Start families. Results indicated that higher caregiver negativity and lower child emotion regulation independently predicted m…
Early Violence Exposure and Self-Regulatory Development
Each year, thousands of American children are exposed to violence in their homes and communities. Although research in multiple fields has shown this violence to have severe and negative consequences for children's self-regulation, this work lacks a unified theoretical orientation that sufficiently captures the complexity of these relationships. Using a bioecological systems framework, the present article presents a multidimensional model of the …
Neighborhood Crime and School Climate as Predictors of Elementary School Academic Quality
Past research has found negative relationships between neighborhood structural disadvantage and students’ academic outcomes. Comparatively little work has evaluated the associations between characteristics of neighborhoods and schools themselves. This study explored the longitudinal, reciprocal relationships between neighborhood crime and school‐level academic achievement within 500 urban schools. Results revealed that higher neighborhood crime (…
Instability versus quality
Prior research has found that higher residential mobility is associated with increased risk for children's academic and behavioral difficulty. In contrast, evaluations of experimental housing mobility interventions have shown moving from high poverty to low poverty neighborhoods to be beneficial for children's outcomes. This study merges these disparate bodies of work by considering how poverty levels in origin and destination neighborhoods moder…
Linear Growth and Child Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Neighborhood economic disadvantage and children's cognitive and social-emotional development
Poverty, physical stature, and cognitive skills
Past research suggests robust positive associations between household socioeconomic status and children's early cognitive development in Western countries. Relatively little is known about these relations in low-income country settings characterized by economic adversity, high prevalence of malnutrition and infectious disease, and relatively lower school enrollment. The present study develops and empirically evaluates an adapted model of early ch…
Children's Cognitive Performance and Selective Attention Following Recent Community Violence
Research has shown robust relationships between community violence and psychopathology, yet relatively little is known about the ways in which community violence may affect cognitive performance and attention. The present study estimates the effects of police-reported community violence on 359 urban children's performance on a computerized neuropsychological task using a quasi-experimental fixed-effects design. Living in close proximity to a rece…
Risk Factors for Childhood Stunting in 137 Developing Countries
BACKGROUND: Stunting affects one-third of children under 5 y old in developing countries, and 14% of childhood deaths are attributable to it. A large number of risk factors for stunting have been identified in epidemiological studies. However, the relative contribution of these risk factors to stunting has not been examined across countries. We estimated the number of stunting cases among children aged 24-35 mo (i.e., at the end of the 1,000 days…
Paternal Stimulation and Early Child Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Few studies have examined the relationship between paternal stimulation and children's growth and development, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This study aimed to estimate the prevalence of paternal stimulation and to assess whether paternal stimulation was associated with early child growth and development. METHODS: Data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys rounds 4 and 5 were combined a…
Early Childhood Developmental Status in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
BACKGROUND: The development of cognitive and socioemotional skills early in life influences later health and well-being. Existing estimates of unmet developmental potential in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are based on either measures of physical growth or proxy measures such as poverty. In this paper we aim to directly estimate the number of children in LMICs who would be reported by their caregivers to show low cognitive and/or socio…
Stunting risk of orphans by caregiver and living arrangement in low-income and middle-income countries
Early orphanhood constitutes a major risk for children's physical development in LMICs. However, the results suggest that the adverse effects of a parental loss can be mitigated if appropriate support is provided, indicating the potential benefits of the surviving parents staying with their children. The benefits of targeted social policies aimed at single fathers and grandparents supporting orphans may be significant
Dimensionality and the Development of Cognitive Assessments for Children in Sub-Saharan Africa
Over the past decade, researchers have shown increased interest in examining the cognitive development of children in non-Western countries, often in connection with evaluations of health and educational interventions. However, many studies have used Western-developed measures without proper consideration of contextual validity. Across domains-from language to cognition to non-cognitive skills-this results in varying degrees of bias that call int…
Early childhood development coming of age
Early Childhood Development Plus Violence Prevention in Low‐ and Middle‐Income Countries
Violence exposure can negatively impact early childhood development ( ECD ), yet limited research exists in low‐ and middle‐income countries ( LMIC s). This study aimed to determine what effective integration of ECD plus violence prevention ( ECD + VP ) can look like in LMIC s. Seventeen key informants were selected using purposive sampling, representing U.N. agencies, donors, implementers and research organisations. Using open coding of semi‐str…
Pathways between paternal and maternal education, caregivers’ support for learning, and early child development in 44 low- and middle-income countries
Impacts of Early Childhood Education on Medium- and Long-Term Educational Outcomes
Despite calls to expand early childhood education (ECE) in the United States, questions remain regarding its medium- and long-term impacts on educational outcomes. We use meta-analysis of 22 high-quality experimental and quasi-experimental studies conducted between 1960 and 2016 to find that on average, participation in ECE leads to statistically significant reductions in special education placement ( d = 0.33 SD , 8.1 percentage points) and grad…
His mind will work better with both of us”
The original article was not updated
Measuring early childhood development at a global scale
The acute effect of community violent crime on maternal engagement in cognitive and socioemotional stimulation
Relations between parenting practices, socioeconomic status, and child behavior in Brazil
Home- and center-based learning opportunities for preschoolers in low- and middle-income countries
Changes in classroom quality predict Ghanaian preschoolers’ gains in academic and social-emotional skills
Rates of participation in early childhood education (ECE) programs are on the rise globally, including in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet little evidence exists on the quality of these programs and on the role of classroom quality in predicting learning for young children across diverse contexts. This study uses data from the Greater Accra Region of Ghana (N = 3,407; M age = 5.8 years; 49.5% female) to examine how changes in four culturally validated dim…
Classifying trajectories of social–emotional difficulties through elementary school
Although research has shown fade-out of the cognitive benefits of classroom-based preschool interventions, less is known regarding the durability of social-emotional impacts. This study examines the extent to which the multicomponent Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP) intervention lowered risk of internalizing, externalizing, attention, and social difficulties from Head Start through elementary school for 602 low-income children. Results sug…
Household Socioeconomic Status and Parental Investments
This study examines how parent socioeconomic status (SES) directly and indirectly predicts children's school readiness through pathways of parental investment. Data come from direct assessments with preschool children and surveys with their primary caregivers in Ghana at the start of the 2015–2016 school year (N = 2,137; Mage = 5.2 years). Results revealed SES-related gaps in all parental investment characteristics and child school readiness skil…
Psychology (50 obras) · Developmental psychology (47 obras) · Early Childhood Education and Development (45 obras) · Medicine (28 obras) · Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development (21 obras) · Child development (21 obras) · Early childhood (20 obras) · Early childhood education (16 obras) · Environmental health (14 obras) · Cognition (13 obras)